Hi,

My question is more to do with the practical ramifications of an upload
than the legal ones, so I'm directing my query here rather than debian-
legal.

I'm packaging carl9170fw (which is already present in Debian main, but
not built from source yet), and this includes a header file called
ch9.h that's taken almost verbatim from the Linux kernel source.

It includes a statement that the license is GPL 2 only with system
calls note (basically a GPL exception), and it's already distributed as
part of the kernel, so surely it's free. However, I'm having trouble
figuring out what to put in my DEP-5 copyright file.

Linux Git shows that this file has had too many contributors to
enumerate, and in fact it's been in Linux since before 2.6.12-rc2,
which is the oldest version in the main repo's history.

Documenting everyone that has ever contributed to this file would take
an immense amount of time and is beyond practical. What's the best
remedy that would satisfy the FTP masters as well as satisfy
prospective sponsors? In this statement from the FTP team [1], they
said that further exceptions for cases like this would not be allowed.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2018/10/msg00004.html

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On Sat, 09 Oct 2021 18:51:37 +0000, John Scott wrote:

It includes a statement that the license is GPL 2 only with system
calls note (basically a GPL exception), and it's already distributed as
part of the kernel, so surely it's free. However, I'm having trouble
figuring out what to put in my DEP-5 copyright file.

Linux Git shows that this file has had too many contributors to
enumerate, and in fact it's been in Linux since before 2.6.12-rc2,
which is the oldest version in the main repo's history.

Documenting everyone that has ever contributed to this file would take
an immense amount of time and is beyond practical.

The relevant question in my understanding is (in general) not "Who
are the contributors?" but "Who are the copyright holders?" [0]

If the file is taken from the kernel source I'd take a look at the
copyright file of source:linux-signed-amd64.

Taking /usr/share/doc/linux-image-5.10.0-8-amd64/copyright on my
disk, ch9.h doesn't seem to be mentioned, so it would seem to fall
under the general clause:

| Files: *
| Copyright: 1991-2012 Linus Torvalds and many others
| License: GPL-2


Cheers,
gregor


[0] Unless there are no copyright holder, then authors can be assumed
to be copyright holders, following the Geneva Convention. - But
that's not the case for the kernel.

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`- NP: Pat Metheny, B.B. King, Dave Brubeck: Pat Metheny & Heath Brothers /

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